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Posts Tagged ‘Alexa’

IFA is the European version of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Perhaps half as many exhibitors, yet still numbering over 100,00 attendees and one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics trade shows. And like CES, it has amazing TV screens, too many fitness wearables, Smart EVERYTHING, and the battle of the Voice Assistants wages on. Here’s a little commentary and lots of pictures on the voice assistants.

It’s not easy to be a retailer today when more and more people are turning to Amazon for shopping. And why not shop online? Ordering is convenient with features such as ratings. Delivery is fast and cheap, and returns are easy and free – if you are Prime member! In April 2018 Bezos reported there are more than 100 million Prime members in the world, and the majority of US households are Prime members. Walmart and Google have partnered in an ecommerce play to compete with Amazon, but Walmart is just dancing with the devil. Google will use the partnership to gather data and invest more in their internal ecommerce and shopping experiences. Walmart isn’t relaxing, and is aggressively pursuing ecommerce and AI initiatives through acquisitions, and its Store #8 that acts as an incubator for AI companies and internal initiatives. Question: why does Facebook have a Building 8 and Walmart have a Store 8 for skunkworks projects?

Apple introduced Siri in 2011 and my world changed. I was running Sensory back then as I am today and suddenly every company wanted speech recognition. Sensory was there to sell it! Steve Jobs, a notorious nay-sayer on speech recognition, had finally given speech recognition the thumbs up. Every consumer electronics company noticed and decided the time had come. Sensory’s sales shot up for a few years driven by this sudden confidence in speech recognition as a user interface for consumer electronics…

Here’s the basic motivation that I see in creating Voice Assistants…Build a cross platform user experience that makes it easy for consumers to interact, control and request things through their assistant. This will ease adoption and bring more power to consumers who will use the products more and in doing so create more data for the cloud providers. This “data” will include all sorts of preferences, requests, searches, purchases, and will allow the assistants to learn more and more about the users. The more the assistant knows about any given user, the BETTER the assistant can help the user in providing services such as entertainment and assisting with purchases (e.g. offering special deals on things the consumer might want). Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail:….

I have spoken on a lot of “voice” oriented shows over the years, and it has been disappointing that there hasn’t been more discussion about the competition in the industry and what is driving the huge investments we see today. Because companies like Amazon and Google participate in and sponsor these shows, there is a tendency to avoid the more controversial aspects of the industry. I wrote this blog to share some of my thoughts on what is driving the competition, why the voice assistant space is so strategically important to companies, and some of the challenges resulting from the voice assistant battles…

Amazon, Google, Sonos, and LINE all introduced smart speakers within a few weeks of each other. Here’s my quick take and commentary on those announcements.

Amazon now has the new Echo, the old Echo, the Echo Plus, Spot, Dot, Show, and Look. The company is improving quality, adding incremental features, lowering cost, and seemingly expanding its leadership position. They make great products for consumers, have a very strong eco-system, and make very tough products to compete with for both their competitors and their many platform partners that use Alexa.

Several hundred articles have been written about Amazon’s new moves into Smart Glasses with the Alexa assistant. And it’s not just TechCrunch, Gizmodo, The Verge, Engadget, and all the consumer tech pubs doing the writing. It’s also places like but CNBC, USA Today, Fox News, Forbes, and many others.

I’ve read a dozen or more and they all say similar things about Amazon (difficulties in phone hardware), Google (failure in Glass), bone conduction mics, mobility for Alexa, strategy to get Alexa Everywhere, etc. But something big got lost in the shuffle.

The hands-free personal assistant that you can wake on voice and talk to naturally has significantly gained popularity the last couple of years. This kind of technology made its debut not all that long ago as a feature of Motorola’s MotoX, a smartphone that had always-listening Moto Voice technology powered by Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree technology. Since then, the always-listening digital assistant quickly spread across mobile phones and PCs from several different brands, making phrases like, “Hey Siri,” “Okay Google,” and, “Hey Cortana,” commonplace.

Then, out of nowhere, Amazon successfully tried its hand at the personal assistant with the Echo, sporting a true natural language voice interface and Alexa cloud-based AI. It was initially marketed for music, but quickly expanded domain coverage to include weather, Q&A, recipes, and the ability to answer common questions. On top of that, Amazon also opened its platform up to third-party developers, allowing them to proliferate the skill sets available on the Alexa platform, with now more than 10,000 skills accessible to users. These skills allow Amazon’s Echo, Tap, and Dot, as well as the several new third-party Alexa-equipped products like Nucleus and Triby, to be used to access and control various IoT functions, from reading heart rates on Fitbits to ordering pizzas and controlling lights within the home.

Virtual handsfree assistants that you can talk to and that talk back have rapidly gained popularity. First, they arrived in mobile phones with Motorola’s MotoX that had an ‘always listening’ Moto Voice powered by Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree technology. The approach quickly spread across mobile phones and PCs to include Hey Siri, OK Google, and Hey Cortana.

Then Amazon took things to a whole new level with the Echo using Alexa. A true voice interface emerged, initially for music but quickly expanding domain coverage to include weather, Q&A, recipes, and the most common queries. On top of that, Amazon took a unique approach by enabling 3rd parties to develop “skills” that now number over 6000! These skills allow Amazon’s Echo line (with Tap, Dot) and 3rd Party Alexa equipped products (like Nucleus and Triby) to be used to control various functions, from reading heartrates on Fitbits to ordering Pizzas and controlling lights.

Until recently, handsfree assistants required a certain minimum power capability to really be always on and listening. Additionally, the hearable market segment including fitness headsets, hearing aids, stereo headsets and other Bluetooth devices needed to use touch control because of their power limitations. Also, Amazons Alexa had required WIFI communications so you could sit on your couch talking to your Echo and query Fitbit information, but you couldn’t go out on a run and ask Alexa what your heartrate was.

All this is changing now with Sensory’s VoiceGenie!

The VoiceGenie runs an embedded recognizer in a low power mode. Initially this is on a Qualcomm/CSR Bluetooth chip, but could be expanded to other platforms. Sensory has taken an SBC music decoder and intertwined a speech recognition system, so that the Bluetooth device can recognize speech while music is playing.

The VoiceGenie is on and listening for 2 keywords:Alexa – this enables Alexa “On the Go” through a cellphone rather than requiring WiFiVoiceGenie – this provides access to all the Bluetooth Device and Handset Device features

For example, a Bluetooth headset’s volume, pairing, battery strength, or connection status can only be controlled by the device itself, so VoiceGenie handles those controls without touching required. VoiceGenie can also read incoming callers’ names and ask the user if they want to answer or ignore. VoiceGenie can call up the phone’s assistant, like Google Assistant or Siri or Cortana, to ask by voice for a call to be made or a song to be played. By saying Alexa, the user gets access to a mobile Alexa ‘On the Go’, so any of the Alexa skills can be utilized while out and about, whether hiking or running!

Some of the important facts behind the new VoiceGenie include:

VoiceGenie is a platform for VoiceAssistants to be used Handsfree on tiny devices

VoiceGenie enables Alexa for a whole new range of portable products

VoiceGenie enables a movement towards invisible assistants that are with you all the time and help you in your daily lives

This third point is perhaps the least understood, yet the most important. People want a personalized assistant that knows them, keeps their secrets safe, and helps them in their daily lives. This help can be accessing information or controlling your environment. It’s very difficult to accomplish this for privacy and power reasons in a cloud powered environment. There needs to be embedded intelligence. It needs to be low power. VoiceGenie is that low powered voice assistant.

I watched Sundar and Rick and the team at Google announce all the great new products from Google. I’ve read a few reviews and comparisons with Alexa/Assistant and Echo/Home, but it struck me that there’s quite an overlap in the reports I’m reading and some of the more interesting things aren’t being discussed.